Nike store opening and Bay to Breakers

It was a very full weekend! Friday I worked a full day at work, carpooled home after work for 2 hours, to find out my friend Suzanne (flying up from San Diego for our annual Bay to Breakers tradition) was delayed at the SD airport. She was supposed to land at 955pm in Oakland and now wasn’t going to land until after 11pm. I knew there was no way I’d still be able to drive another hour+ back home after picking her up, only to have to leave my house at 8am Saturday morning to drive back to the city. Instead, I used HotelTonight to book a room close to the Oakland airport. If you’ve never used the HotelTonight app, when you sign up and use the code ‘SCAINES,’ you’ll get $25 in credit! It’s really great when you’re in need of a last minute hotel room. Unexpected things come up and who doesn’t love to find a cheap hotel room (but nice hotels) when you’re in a bind? The hotel was right next to the airport, free parking (take that San Francisco!), free wifi, free shuttle, HUGE comfy bed AND best of all, AMAZING FREE BREAKFAST!! Seriously though, they had everything.

Suz remembered to IG her breakfast of champs :)

We headed out to the city to pick up a couple boxes from my office, and then head to Cow Hollow to the new Nike store on Union Street. They had their grand opening the night before, and were having all kinds of events that weekend to celebrate. You had to RSVP in advance, and most classes and events filled up pretty quickly. We signed up for the Nike Run Club at 10:30am and miraculously made it in pretty quick time and found a parking spot less than a block away (SF miracle). The new store is a retail store that focuses on womens running, training and sportswear, but also has for men as well (they also do styling, bra fitting, weekly Nike+ Run Clubs, and Nike Training Club classes with partner gyms and locations in the surrounding neighborhoods). You can follow the Nike SF Twitter account for more event information.There were tons of ladies there (and a few good men) ready to get their run on. They had tables set up, you could test out the Nike+ Sportwatch and FlyKnit shoes, and every person got a DryMax shirt – I think mainly so they wouldn’t lose us on the run haha. They were pretty organized with pacers and everything (each carrying a Beats Pill to make sure we had some upbeat tunes to run to, which was fantastic – and now I really want one!) They led us through the rest of Cow Hollow, down along the Marina and then back up to Union Street. We were on the “long course,” so it was supposed to be a little over 4 miles, but it only ended up being 3.05 miles. Oh well, a runs a run! When we finished, they had Pressed Juicery, Kind bars, Nike water bottles (already filled with water!), Zico coconut water and sweat towels waiting for us – SCORE! We then headed to the expo, found free parking close by (again, it was a day of SF miracles), picked up our packets, walked around the expo a bit, and by that time we were on the verge of hangry. We drove close to my work, parked and walked down to Boudin near Pier 39 to get some sourdough soup bowls. We’re pretty sure they put tryptophan in sourdough or something because we BARELY made it home before passing out. The nap was glorious and we were ready for dinner at 8pm! We ended up going to Yellowtail Sushi (bomb.com if you’re ever in Alameda!), quick trip to Target to pick up a towel and then back to the apartment to visit with our friend we were staying with and head to bed. Alarm clock went off super early, we got dressed and drove to BART. Thankfully BART made one good decision in the past year, and opened BART earlier so people could actually take public transport to the race – they never do this and it’s stupid! We walked around looking for caffeine once we got into SF, I randomly ran into Pavement Runner on the way, got into our corral and waited… and waited… and waited.

Quite a few folks asked if that was actually coffee in our cups, or semi-hidden. We were tired and it was early. It was most definitely caffeine (mine in the form of a soy Earl Grey tea latte)

It was supposed to start at 8am and it didn’t start until about 840am, which meant our corral didn’t cross until almost 9am. We were impatient and just wanted to get the show on the road because the drunk suburban moms were getting on our LAST nerves.

You can’t get away without a selfie!

We decided last minute to run as much of the race as we could. Starting in the last corral and almost an hour late was not conducive to any type of record breaking times (although, since we always walk the race to people watch, any time would be a PR for us haha). It took awhile until the crowd thinned enough to start running, and most of our running had to happen on the sidewalk since it was so crowded. There was A LOT of zigging and zagging. By the time we got to Hayes Hill we had to walk because it seemed like every single drunkie was partying on the hill and we could barely push through walking. It was insane. That’s what happens when you push the start to a later time (at 8am) and then start it late on top of that. People are passed out, puking or stumbling by 9:30am. The run felt fabulous actually, even though parts were fast and parts were slow. We had no idea how fast we were actually going since none of us had our watches or Nike apps on, but the body felt good!

We made it to Golden Gate Park!

And while running through part of the park, randomly ran into another friend who was on our Ragnar team last year for Napa Valley.

So this photo is a screenshot that my friend in Australia took. She was looking at the Instagram “popular” feed and was like, that girl looks like Sheena, I’m going to take a pic and send it to her. Doppelganger! … wait… that IS Sheena!” So basically, Ebo and I were internet famous for a few minutes :)

All in all, it was a good race, and always fun to do Bay to Breakers. If we decide to do it again next year and actually run, even slow, we’re going to have to start in either corral B or C. And they’ve definitely got some kinks to work out as well: Lyft was a sponsor this year and they were offering rides after the race. They had a designated parking lot for you to wait for a ride. It was a cluster. We had to wait in line for almost 1.5 hours JUST to get into a car, even though there were always 15-20+ cars waiting in line to pick up people the ENTIRE time. Absolutely ridiculous.